_Darwinism_ versus _Child-Protection_.--The Darwinians maintain that all these considerations apply with equal force to child-protection. We must, they tell us, protect strong children only, and do nothing for the weakly. Child-protection to-day, they insist, effects the reverse of this. It counteracts excessive child mortality, which is an effective factor in selection, through its destruction of weakly children. For example, the existence of foundling hospitals induces many parents to abandon the care of their own children, and to commit these to the foundling hospitals. Many parents, being aware that the State undertakes the coercive reformatory education of neglected children, deliberately neglect the education of their own children, in order to force the community to undertake it. During the first years of life, continue these ultra-Darwinians, more children die than in the later years of childhood, because, owing to natural selection in the first years of life, a larger proportion of the weak succumb, so that the level of health of those in the later years of childhood is considerably higher. High infant mortality is at once a symptom and a means of natural-selection. Years characterised by high infant mortality necessarily follow years in which the infantile death-rate has been low. In countries with high infant mortality the population is stronger, because the badly-equipped new-born infants die in greater proportion than the well-equipped; in subsequent years the mortality is consequently lower, the fitness for military service is greater, and tuberculosis is less common. To diminish infant mortality would lead to a more rapid increase of population; it would, in fact, give rise to over-population to such an extent that the struggle for existence would become even more cruel and abhorrent than it is to-day. Certain departments of child-protection lead to the preservation of children whose survival is altogether undesirable--children which would otherwise have perished during the first years of life. (If it is true that illegitimate children are of very little use to the community, and if it is impossible to prevent the birth of such children, it is at any rate desirable, continue the writers of this school, that those which actually do come into the world should die as soon as possible. Consider also born criminals. These inflict grave injury on the community. If it is impossible to prevent their birth, should not society at least take steps to secure that their life should be as short as possible?)